Darpa seeks pop-up wall-in-a-can

If you think you have the tech to do this, Darpa would like to hear from you.

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa) is on the hunt for technology or a material that could be packed into a cylinder and rapidly deployed to block access to a specified area.

The brief—titled Block Access to Deny Entry (BlockADE)—suggests it could be a "web, wall, blockade or barrier" and just needs to be able to launch automatically (go-go gadget WALL!), "without human intervention." "Darpa envisions a compact system filled with a material and/or device that, when remotely triggered, can expand by orders of magnitude to form a structure to prevent ingress or egress by a person/people," Darpa explains.

The innovation agency is interested in both structures that can be deployed from a single point source to prevent someone from accessing a particular object (by filling a room with some sort of flexible structure) and structures that could instantly create a fence or wall around something, made out of multiple point sources.

Key to all of these ideas will be for the structure to be able to initiate and expand by several orders of magnitude very quickly and autonomously. Darpa is also keen that whatever the material of the structure, it can block or slow access even to people with hand tools such as saws, hammers, axes, and shovels.

Material-wise, Darpa suggests that foams, shape memory alloys, pop-up structures, and polymers could be of interest, as well as "completely novel approaches."

All of this should take place in a cylindrical delivery device that is one foot in diameter, six-and-a-half feet tall and can hold around 285lb.

We can't help but remind ourselves about the ten-by-five meter inflatable structure that the US Department of Homeland Security developed to quickly block up transit or rail tunnels in the event of flooding or the release of chemical agents. The cylindrical "resilient tunnel plug" is made out of a flexible material that can be rapidly inflated to seal off tunnels.